My advice would be to not just focus on a use case, but actually have a small "starter project" in mind that you can prototype an MVP for. My starter project[1

My advice would be to not just focus on a use case, but actually have a small "starter project" in mind that you can prototype an MVP for. My starter project[1] was a set of bindings for pandoc-types, so you can manipulate Pandoc ASTs in Rust. It's a very small library, but it's enough to plausibly do something interesting. It's also big enough to get me to play with serde and some serialization stuff in Rust. So it was a pretty good size to start with. https://github.com/elliottslaughter/rust-pandoc-types https://github.com/elliottslaughter/rust-pandoc-types [1]: Technically, I did work in Rust prior to this, but it was all long before 1.0, so I had to relearn when I picked it back up.